David is a twenty-six-year-old conservative who has become deeply distrustful of information coming from mainstream media or establishment sources. After being radicalized by Alex Jones, he has begun doubting everything from the moon landing to the existence of viruses. He is part of a group of like-minded friends who routinely bemoan how gullible most people are to information supplied by mainstream outlets. However, when it comes to conspiracy theories or alternative news sources, David himself is extremely naive, as he routinely repeats ideas and shares links without first investigating the veracity of the content.
David’s information consumption habits are similar to those of Alyson, a college freshman who believes the United States is on the verge of a take-over from right-wing, heteronormative, hate groups. Alyson routinely consumes videos from YouTube that confirm her beliefs about the world, yet rarely does she investigate the truth or falsity of the videos she watches and shares.
Alyson and David are not real people but are composites of numerous people we have spoken with over the years. The patterns they represent are becoming all too familiar: naïve consumption of information coupled with resistance to conducting due diligence on information being consumed and circulated.
Alyson and David represent a wider cultural trend towards what has been described as a deficit in information literacy. The term “information literacy” emerged in the 1970s among scholars working in Library and Information Science (LIS) research and practice, and refers to a person’s competency at retrieving, understanding, evaluating, and working with information. As with other forms of literacy, the term can refer both to an academic domain studying a phenomenon, as well as a topic that is taught.
A person’s level of information literacy is independent from the truth or falsehood of the information being consumed. David and Alyson may well share and distribute information that is true, as may someone like Alex Jones, yet that does not mean such people possess high levels of information literacy. Although there are many ways to gauge a person’s level of information literacy, one basic test is whether they can provide credible answers to questions like:
- How do you know that a website is reliable?
- What steps would you perform to conduct due diligence on information from a podcast?
- What are some digital tools you could use for verifying or falsifying contested information claims on a controversial subject?
- What type of information is more suited for an internet inquiry and what type is more suited for books?
- What are some methods for setting up an effective Google search?
Information literacy also includes what we do with information acquired, such as the ability to synthesize and integrate information into larger schemas of knowledge, or the ability to use critical thinking when reflecting on it.
There are numerous theories for why there is a growing deficit in information literacy, and how this deficit is contributing to various cultural crises. Some theories focus on the technological roots of the crisis, while others look at the cultural, political, psychological, educational or philosophical origins. While all of these frameworks correctly identify part of the problem, I have come to believe that the current crisis of information literacy is correlated with an eclipse in the epistemic virtues that the book of Proverbs associates with wisdom.
But what do I mean by “epistemic virtue.” Let’s start with the word virtue, a concept around which there is much confusion.
In the ancient tradition of ethical inquiry—whether Hebrew, Chinese, Greek, Roman, or early Christian—ethics was primarily about persons, and only secondarily about actions. Among the fundamental questions of moral philosophy were:
- What kind of person do I want to become?
- What does a flourishing human life look like?
When applied to citizens in the aggregate, this line of inquiry constituted the central political question, namely,
- What character traits in citizens will foster flourishing in the city?
Within the ancient world, the answers to these questions always involved some account of the virtues: qualities like courage, kindness, wisdom, honesty, integrity, temperance, patience, etc.
While not everyone agreed on what constituted virtue (e.g. for Aristotle, humility is not a virtue whereas the church fathers see it as one of the highest virtues), there was a common consensus that through dutiful habits, educational formation, and proper spiritual practices, we can develop the right attitudes and traits necessary to become well-ordered and mature human beings.
To apply this framework to the vocation of a thinker, we want to ask, “What virtues lead to flourishing as a good thinker and truth-finder?” Or, focusing the question on the type of right thinking relevant to contemporary digital environments:
- What character traits, attitudes, and dispositions help foster wise habits of information retrieval and evaluation?
- What kind of person would I need to be to effectively conduct due diligence on an information source?
- What character traits could help me respond to and work with information wisely?
In attempting to answer these questions, we do not need to reinvent the wheel, but can draw on a tradition from the classical period through to the Christian era that highlights a set of character traits that are constitutive of truth-acquisition and wise information use. I shared some of these traits in the section on epistemic virtue in Part 3 of my series on digital boundaries.
To understand how epistemic virtues work with digital information, it will be helpful to walk our way through four of the virtues.
Let’s start with metacognition. Metacognition means watching our thinking in much the same way as an athlete might watch his or her body. Metacognition is a way to take control of the cognitive processes that undergird seeking, evaluating, and using information. By watching his or her body, the athlete is able to notice what training works and what training doesn’t work, and what might lead to injury. Similarly, through metacognition we can monitor our thinking when we’re online, catching ourselves when we fall into epistemic vices like hurried thinking, the Dunning-Kruger effect, mental rigidity, the epistemological bubble effect, the echo chamber effect, anchoring bias, etc.
Another epistemic virtue is cognitive empathy. While emotional empathy is the ability to feel someone else’s emotions even when the person’s emotions differ from your own, cognitive empathy is the ability to know what someone else is thinking even when his/her thoughts differ from your own. It is an ability to see things from the other person’s point of view. This virtue enables us to understand why a person’s position makes sense to them even if it is a position you strongly disagree with, and enables us to summarize someone else’s ideas (and the reasons behind those ideas) in our own words in a way the other person would acknowledge is fair. St. Paul used cognitive empathy in understanding the background ideas to the Athenians when preaching to them, or in how he tailored the message and style of different letters to the particular audience he was addressing. By contrast, lack of cognitive empathy leads to difficulty working wisely with information and correlates with epistemic vices like caricaturing, oversimplifying, misrepresentation, and inattention to detail.
Another important epistemic virtue is confidence in reason. As an epistemic virtue, confidence in reason is a state of mind that incentivizes one to use important tools in the discovery of truth, including critical thinking, logical reasoning, and intellectual attentiveness. A person lacking strong confidence in reason will be more likely to make claims like, “it doesn’t matter if I’m diligent because everything is just a point of view anyway,” or “in cherry-picking sources that confirm my biases, I’m simply doing what everyone does.” In the context of digital retrieval activities, confidence in reason makes it possible for the wise man or woman to ask questions such as:
- Is the writer’s reasoning sound?
- Does this writer’s conclusions follow logically from the information (premises) he or she has presented?
- If this writer’s information is false, then does that render his conclusion faulty, or can these be considered separately?
- Is the information in this source logically consistent?
- What information in this source might still be true even if the author’s conclusions do not follow from the preceding premises?
Another epistemic virtue, perhaps the most important, is intellectual humility. The concept of intellectual humility is much more than just “I could be wrong, and should keep that in mind.” Rather, virtue epistemologists have emphasized that intellectual humility stands as an antidote to the following vices that often influence how we interact with information and ideas: arrogance, vanity, conceit, egotism, hyper-autonomy, grandiosity, pretentiousness, snobbishness, presumption, haughtiness, self-righteousness, domination, selfish ambition, and self-complacency. In short, intellectual humility connects the moral and epistemic aspects of humility. The humble person does not clamber for the “entitlements” associated with intellectual status/ recognition, nor does his obsession with having to be right (selfish ambition) lead to defensiveness, shortcuts in research, caricaturing opponents, and insensitivity to detail.
We could go on, and in the above video I give a list of other epistemic virtues.
One feature of each of these virtues is that they function as skills, competencies, and aptitudes that can be taught, practiced, and habituated; but they also function as dispositions and traits of someone’s personality and character. There is a symbiotic relationship between these levels, because when we practice right behavior over time, this leads to good habits, while good habits over time lead to character traits, while good character traits over time lead to us becoming a certain sort of person. This is why each of the epistemic virtues can be approached at the level of actions that can be taught through educational formation and habit-forming exercises, as well as dispositions that are descriptive of the wise man or woman’s personality.